C. John Collins, «Colossians 1,17 'hold together': A co-opted term», Vol. 95 (2014) 64-87
The Greek terms rendered 'hold together' in Col 1,17 (sunistemi), Wis 1,7 (suneko), and Sir 43,26 (sugkeimai) do not derive from Septuagint renderings of the Hebrew Bible; instead they are terms that Second Temple Jewish and Greek Christian apologists co-opted from Hellenistic philosophy to commend 'biblical' concepts to the Graeco-Roman world. From these texts we can infer the semantic relationships of these verbs. The 'liturgical composition' in Col 1,15-20 displays a combination of biblical wisdom and co-opted philosophy.
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84 C. JOHN COLLINS
The content of the passage shows that it draws on “wisdom†mo-
tifs, especially from Proverbs (in the LXX, with perhaps some aware-
ness of the MT). For example, compare Col 1,16a “for in/by him [evn
autw] all things were createdâ€, with Prov 3,19-20a (LXX):
v |/
19
God by wisdom [th/| sofi,a|; Heb. beḥoḵmÄh] founded the earth;
in/by understanding [evn fronh,sei; Heb. biṯḇûnÄh] he prepared
the heavens;
20
in/by discernment [evn aivsqh,sei; Heb. beá¸a‘tô] the deeps broke
open …
Each of the three lines has an instrumental expression with He-
brew be- (“in†or “by means ofâ€), and each of the Greek expressions
is also instrumental — though the parallelism would have been bet-
ter served with Greek evn in all three 46. The syntax of “in Christ all
things were created†(Col 1,15) is parallel to that of Proverbs 3,
with “Christ†in the same syntactic relation to verbs for God’s cre-
ative work as Proverbs has for the divine intellectual attributes of
wisdom, understanding, and discernment.
In the same way, the expression in Col 1,17a, “he is before [pro,]
all thingsâ€, echoes the way in which personified Wisdom describes
itself in Prov 8,23-25 47:
23
before this age he [the Lord, v. 22] established me in the beginning,
24
before he made the earth and before he made the depths,
before the springs of water went forward,
25
before the mountains were made firm,
and before all hills he begets me.
In other words, Wisdom was “before†all things 48.
46
Apparently “several fathers†include evn with th|/ sofi,a| in the first line
of verse 19; see C. H. TOY, Proverbs (ICC; Edinburgh 1899) 73 (though with-
out citations).
47
The approach followed here assumes that one must satisfy criteria in
order to establish a genuine “echoâ€; for discussion, see C. J. COLLINS, “Echoes
of Aristotle in Romans 2:14-15â€, Journal of Markets and Morality 13 (2010)
123-173, at 126-128.
48
N. T. WRIGHT, “Poetry and Theology in Colossians 1.15-20â€, NTS 36
(1990) 444-468, cites a suggestion from C.F. Burney, that the poem in Colos-
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